Today’s wedding from Wildflowers Photography is stuffed to the brim with love, and it shows in every aspect of the wedding day. With a focus on family heirlooms, recycling, and some inspiration from butterflies, Alicia and Chris (who are also photographers) had a wedding reception that no one in their circle will forget any time soon! Be sure to keep an eye out for the amazing flowers, all of which came from the newlyweds’ very own garden.

From the bride, Alicia: We started our planning with a couple of themes that we love, a little Alice in Wonderland, and a little Pride & Prejudice. In the end, we decided to just make the wedding represent us as a couple instead of a specific theme. I also wanted all of our decor to either be vintage or handmade.

We like to think that our wedding reception was a lot like our home decor, on a much grander scale. We tend to refer to our decorating style as “vintage rustic glam”, and I think our reception was somewhere along those lines as well. Our colors were peacock blue and pink, with dashes of yellow, purple, and all the other colors of our garden. We considered renting furniture and decor from a vintage rental company, but felt that would be silly since I have been collecting vintage furniture and decor for so many years. The morning of the wedding reception, we loaded up a moving van with the help of our good friend Mike, and set up a good portion of our furniture and decorations from home at the reception location.

One thing that we were really set on having was a lot of mix and match vintage china. We originally considered renting china, but decided that we would like to have our own set of mixed vintage china anyway. We spent many weekends scouring thrift stores and estate sales until we had purchased around 300 plates and enough tea cups for all of the guests as well. Eventually we plan to sort through some of it and pare down our collection a little!

Any advice for brides planning their weddings now? Make a list of the projects you want to make, and prioritize them into “must haves” and “nice to have”. There were a few other projects on my “nice to have” list that got dropped once we got too close to the big day and I was running low on time. Be sure that all of the projects you take on make sense for your wedding and the guests you plan to invite. If you won’t have any trouble with people seating themselves, escort cards and place cards are a lot of work if they aren’t needed. As wedding photographers ourselves, we often see a lot of wedding programs go unused. If you are going to go to the trouble of making programs, be sure someone passes them out! Also, be sure to utilize Etsy! I had originally planned to make my own cake decorations, but ended up ordering some amazing edible butterflies from Etsy. I just loved them, and would not have been able to make something like that myself. I was also able to find cufflinks on Etsy for Chris that I had custom made to match our logo for our own photography company! They turned out so cute!